Life has been hectic over the past few months, where do I start.........

I went to All Bar one in Edinburgh, Lothian Road, to celebrate my friend Gillian's 40th birthday. This was a great afternoon / night out as I was with my wife, pictured below, and a whole lot of friends. The bar itself is usually full of suits from the surrounding offices and a bit sterile, but on this occasion it felt very friendly with enough staff to keep us fed and watered. The range of lagers and wines is good, but its lacking a real ale range. Worth a visit, but as you would expect it is much the same as any other All Bar One.

In October I went to work in France, Lyon, at a pharmaceutical conference for 10 days. This was a large conference and took a large crew, some of whom are pictured below, three days to build. The hotel we were staying at was a long way out of town and unfortunately there were no bars near to us, so we spent a lot of the nights in the hotel bar. The best beer that they had, to my taste, was Beck's Vier. Hmmmm....

This is me, below, at the Lyon Congress Center.

On the last day of the conference, just before we broke the stand down, I came backanother part of the event and found this on the video wall !! This really made my day as this video wall is huge ! and it takes a bit of time and effort to put the slide together. Thanks to the guys that did this.

If you don't know what the "Tartan Pint" is, I've written a book called "The Tartan Pint" which is all about all the beer and breweries in Scotland. The book is available from Amazon - check it out.

The night before we flew home we had a night out in the old town of Lyon. The picture below shows some of the crew in a pub called "The Smoking Dog". This is a typical small French pub with a great selection of beers and wines. It had a beautiful laid back feel which I enjoyed, so we had a few drinks here.

We then moved onto a great restaraunt in an even older part of Lyon. The food here was some of the best I have ever tasted ! I even made the manager get the chef out of the kitchen so I could tell him how much I'd loved his food.

In November I started working on a roadshow for a large bank which lasts until the end of February 2013 ! It takes me all over England, Wales and Scotland so I'm looking forward to getting to some great new pubs and trying some great new drinks.